Procedure in Plain Air

Later, after the men in jumpsuits had driven up and begun digging the hole, Stevick would remember that the guy on the bench beside him had been gazing puzzledly into the cone of his large coffee and had tried to interest him in the question of whether the café’s brew aftertasted of soap or not. This day was gray, with heavy portents of rain. Not the best for sitting on the coffee shop’s bench, but the interior of the café had become insufferable in all ways to Stevick: the shop’s ambience and fancy name, its well-programmed iPod and fake-industrial chairs and tables and counters succeeding too completely, the room seething with overdressed-dishevelled types, nerve-rackedly Web surfing or doing the real-world equivalent with eye orbits through the room, every last one of whom made him feel mossy, corroded, replaced. Add to that the danger of running into his ex, Charlotte, and he never even glanced within in hope of a seat—he didn’t want one. Just black, to go. He was an outdoor-bencher, he’d take his chances with the others here, backs to the shop’s window, and if rain drove them off he’d have it to himself. Nor did he care to consider whether the coffee tasted of soap or not. He was getting his morning thrill on, his eye-opener, and this place, besides being on the right corner of the right block for him to stumble in, made a fine, joltingly strong concoction strictly from the addict’s point of view. It could taste of lysergic acid or oysters, for all he cared. Maybe every cup of coffee he’d ever drunk had tasted of soap, so he couldn’t discern soap from coffee—who knew?

Stevick, meant to be job hunting, wasn’t. Too generous severance had blurred his motivation in the months when it would have mattered. Now, season slanting to Memorial Day, the flag of Manhattan’s office life was at half-mast until September. So Stevick was propped like a morning crow on that bench when the truck arrived. His front-row seat recalled to him memories of childhood puppet shows, of gazing up at the slotted stage from which Punch and Judy and their like protruded. The soapy-coffee theorist was curled over some device, brow knit, thumbs-deep in a text-message campaign, making Stevick the only witness to the disembarkment of the truck’s occupants.

They parked, apparently heedlessly, in the space in front of a hydrant, but without coming nearer than three feet to the curb. Cars slowed to pass. Stevick doubted that a garbage truck could have made it through. Surely a temporary placement, a compromise, then. The vehicle was an ungainly bolted-iron thing, resembling some reconfigured laundry or diaper truck, not massive like those used for transport of money, but solid enough in its way. Two men in jumpsuits popped out of the cab, and within a minute had orange traffic cones up to claim the territory that extended a few feet behind the truck, as well as between it and the curb. One contemplated the hydrant and then wryly topped it with a cone, which perched there like a dunce cap. It made an effective preëmption of any indigenous neighborhood protest, an easy trump: the men in jumpsuits seemed to have some official function, even if their truck was unmarked.

The tools with which the two men dug the hole were notably quiet and efficient. After first marking a square of asphalt with yellow spray paint, using a band saw of daunting size and intensity they carved the blacktop along the lines of drying paint. At this point, Stevick’s might still have been the only eyes attending. Perhaps these activities had drawn distracted, unsustained glances from a passing postal worker or nanny. Certainly nobody emerged into the chill morning from the café’s interior, where those not obliviously earbudded were likely hunkered in routine annoyance against the saw’s zip, much as they’d be for a passing siren or the clunk of a truck’s axle in a pothole—nothing off the ordinary urban-decibel scale. The soap complainer had wandered away when Stevick wasn’t looking.

The jackhammers, though, drew complaint. Several exasperated café denizens packed their laptops and muttered in the loose direction of the truck and its jumpsuited operatives as they fled the scene, like birds flitting to another treetop, and no more courageous. One of the café’s counterpersons, a chubby guy in an apron, seeing business spooked, made a more forthright protest, even shaking his fist. But the small dimension of the task blunted his protest: by the time the jumpsuited pair had ignored the counterperson for a minute or two, minute smiles perhaps rippling their lips—or was this an effect of the device’s vibration?—they were shifting the jackhammer back into the truck, in favor of shovels and picks, with which they deftly cleared the hole of shattered black chunks. Stevick nodded consolation to the counterperson, who had, after all, poured his soapy coffee forty-five minutes before. What remained of it was cold.

The excavation was complete by the time Stevick wandered by half an hour later, having picked up his dry cleaning from the Korean and used his own bathroom before circling back to the café. Rain still threatened, hadn’t arrived. Stevick couldn’t say why he was enthralled by the activities that had commenced with the truck’s arrival; some intimation, he supposed in retrospect, though it wasn’t uncommon for him to buzz the café two or three times in a procrastinating morning. The hole was steep and accurate, hewing to the spray-painted plan still visible in two corners where the lines of paint, meeting, had pooled and blurred: an inverted phone booth of emptied dirt and rubble. Three fat fitted planks lay stacked beside the hole, sized to make a rough cover, Stevick guessed. The hole’s former contents had been heaped precariously at the curb—the hydrant wasn’t likely to be back in commission too soon, at this rate. The orange cone remained, like an ill-fitted condom stuck on its head. The truck, however, was gone.

And then it was back, jerking to a halt at the curb before him, as if responsive to Stevick’s own presence, to his attentions; however absurd this notion might be, Stevick had conceived it. With an unhurried persistence, the jumpsuited men emerged again and opened the van’s rear, then stepped inside to wrangle out what at first might have seemed another object but then revealed itself to be a man, a human captive. The man was dressed in the same uniform, as though recently demoted from their company. But his skin, Stevick noted wearily, as if this fact beckoned to outrage he ought to feel rising within him but didn’t, was darker than theirs. His head shaved, where their hair was intact; his two-or-three-day beard rough, where theirs were, in one case, trimmed into a goatee and, in the other, shaved clean. So the jumpsuits, rather than suggesting equivalence between the three, framed difference. A cruddy cloth gagged the captive’s mouth; another bound his wrists in front of him. His eyes didn’t trouble to plead as his captors led him to the fresh hole and lowered him within, taking care not to scuff his elbows on the crumbled lip. They’d measured well: the captive nestled just underneath the three fat boards when these were fitted over his head. One of the jumpsuited operatives stood atop the boards, testing their firmness with apparent satisfaction, while the other quickly loaded the cones into the back of the truck. Now, at last, the rain began to fall.

“How—?” Stevick began, then faltered, unsure of his question. “How long are you going to leave him in there?”

The two could barely be bothered to hesitate, in their hurry for the shelter of the truck’s cab. “We’re on installation and delivery,” the clean-shaven one said as he assumed the driver’s seat. “Pick-up’s another department.”

“Are we talking hours or days or weeks?” Stevick said, locating, perhaps belatedly, some faint civic courage, a notion that he’d absorbed certain duties as a local witness to the open-air procedure, perhaps by default, but no less legitimately for that. Besides, others inside the café might be watching through the window. His question was perhaps a feeble one, but, for anyone observing, the fact that he’d stood up from the bench and begun some sort of stalling interrogation could be seen as crucial, either in a deeper intervention to be conducted by more effective or informed members of the community or in some later accounting of Stevick’s comportment and behavior.

“I really didn’t look at the schedule in this case,” the driver said. “But they’re rarely installed for more than three or four days in a single location.”

“Those boards are in no way tight enough to keep the rain from falling on him,” Stevick pointed out. By placing their hole so near the hydrant, they’d prevented a parked car from giving shelter to the hole. On the other hand, perhaps they’d spared the hole’s inhabitant something terrifying in being doubly pinned by the low ceiling of a vehicle’s undercarriage. Probably Stevick was guilty of overthinking: it was impossible to find a parking space in this neighborhood, so they’d settled on the obvious solution.

“That’s generous of you to notice, citizen,” the driver said. He gestured to the occupant of the passenger seat, the goateed man, who’d been sitting with his arms crossed and rolling his eyes, miming impatience. Now this silent partner produced something from the floor of the truck’s cab: a compact black umbrella—the inexpensive double-hinged kind you might purchase at a shoe-repair shop, having ducked in during a gale. He handed it to the driver, who passed it through the open window to Stevick. “This is why we’re grateful you came along when you did,” the driver said, nodding to indicate the hole. “Don’t be afraid to stand on top—it’ll easily support your weight.”

With that they were gone, and for the last time. Stevick never saw them again; the driver hadn’t been misleading him when he alluded to the narrow specialization of their tasks. Now there was only the hole, its occupant, and Stevick, with his own duties. For, when freed by the truck’s departure he turned to face the café, no one in fact was regarding him from the window, now streaked with rain and curtained by a dripping overhang. Stevick opened the umbrella. The hole was silent. Stevick could easily have gone home, but instead he stepped over, tested the soundness of the footing on top—there was little doubt, he’d watched them work—and sheltered both himself and the sturdy boards from the rain as well as he could beneath the feeble rigging of black cloth and wire.

In a lull the aproned counterman stepped outside the café’s doors for a cigarette break. He nodded curtly at Stevick, exhaled smoke rising into the rain. “So you’re in charge now, huh?” he said.

“I didn’t want to leave him completely alone.” There had been no sound, barely a detectable motion from the hole beneath his feet, where the captive now sat braced, knees wedged in dirt. “I wouldn’t say I’m in charge in any wider sense,” Stevick continued. “I’m something of a stopgap or placeholder, really.”

“I more than understand,” the café employee said. “We’re in a similar situation. Just a gig between real jobs, that’s what I keep telling myself.” He tossed his fuming butt into the gutter, quite near. “There’s a million stories like yours and mine.”

“That’s not what I was getting at,” Stevick began, but, uninterested, the counterman had returned inside. The café’s population had never completely recovered from the jackhammer exodus; that, combined with the rain, kept Stevick’s vigil a lonely one. He preferred it, actually. The usual early-afternoon dog-walkers passed by, hunched in tented plastic ponchos, their smaller dogs, the terriers and dachshunds, sheathed in sleeveless plaid coats, but Stevick had always regarded the walkers as ships on a distant sea, some passing flotilla. Even on days of bright sunshine, they were too occupied with canine herding and the management of plastic-bagged turds to engage in the human life of the street. Though few other humans acknowledged him, Stevick liked to believe that he was still a participant in this mainstream. Whether his relation to the man beneath the boards qualified as a human transaction was another question.

Toward evening, the rain tailed, though not enough so that Stevick lowered the umbrella. The café’s clientele turned over; the tables were set for dinner, decorated with lit candles, menus in place; the staff even switched off the WiFi, in order to chase out the most tenacious of the afternoon Googlers. Others of Stevick’s neighbors, the professionally dressed, beleaguered rush-hour subwayers, slavers in financial offices, trudged past the corner with their own umbrellas. Though Stevick always thought of them as upright sheep, some were surprisingly bold in their muttering.

“Not in my back yard, eh?” Stevick said. “Boy, when something like this arrives in your midst you learn pretty fast who’s who in this neighborhood, you yuppie.” Stevick spoiled for a fight, feeling now all the insurgent defiance he ought to have summoned for the diggers of the hole. But what was done was done. Defense of what should never have been in the first place had become Stevick’s province.

“You artists need to grow up and learn the difference between an installation piece and a hole in the ground,” the man sneered. Surely Stevick’s age or younger, yet dressed like Stevick’s grandfather, he added, “Slack-ass.”

Stevick was incensed. “There’s a man in this hole!”

“Don’t bore me with your disgusting personal situation!”

“It’s not a personal situation, you fucker!”

“Roll up and die, grubbie!”

“Yaaaaarrrr!” They charged with umbrellas outheld, Stevick feeling he’d abandoned his station but unable to stem the urge to gore the man on the sidewalk and see him plead for mercy in the rain. Yet the two men essentially missed, failed to engage, the broad opened umbrellas merely grazing in a rubbery wet shudder as they passed. The single thrust having apparently exhausted his neighbor as much as it did Stevick, the man regathered his briefcase tightly beneath his elbow. “I need to go pay the nanny,” he murmured as he slunk off. Stevick retreated to his task.

It was night, and inside the café the menus at several of the tables had been taken up, wine poured, little plates delivered by the time another specialist made contact with Stevick. He wasn’t, as Stevick might have hoped, a sentry arriving to relieve Stevick of a duty that, now that he contemplated it, he had to admit was self-assigned. Rather, the jumpsuited man, a sturdy, almost fat one this time, with heavy, black-rimmed eyeglasses and a Yankees cap shielding him from the rain, appeared to be some kind of inspector, charged with insuring the rightness of the site and recording in cryptic shorthand, with a ballpoint pen on a clipboarded sheet, certain impressions. The man double-parked his car, the blinking hazard lights of which gave clear evidence of the passing nature of his visit, and suggested to Stevick a long itinerary of random checks still ahead of him. He then politely asked Stevick for assistance in drawing aside the cover of planks. Stevick, in turn, extended the umbrella to help protect the operative’s clipboard while he wrote.

The captive, Stevick noted with relief, didn’t appear any more—or less—uncomfortable than when he’d first been lowered into his hole. He stood, as if to acknowledge the inspector’s attentions, but didn’t glance upward, possibly not wishing to incur rebuke, or perhaps he had merely grown incurious about what were, for him, routine operations. When the inspector went back to his car and returned bearing a wax-paper cup with a straw and a pair of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, Stevick understood that he intended to feed the man in the hole, and saw also that the captive had at some point spat the dirty cloth from his mouth, so that it now encircled his throat like a necklace. Probably it had never been secure to begin with, and the captive had not wished to embarrass the men who’d dug the hole by flaunting their ineffectual knotting skills. The inspector lowered both the cup with the straw and half a sandwich to within range of the captive’s mouth, and the man in the hole quietly and efficiently fed and drank. Stevick considered the fact that the captive could have cried out at any point and had chosen not to. Perhaps he’d learned that it led only to more punishment, if punishment was the right word. Stevick had begun to realize that he ascribed a certain strength, a gravity and authenticity, to the man in the hole, or perhaps to the hole itself, with which he wished to be associated, as in the sense of a shared undertaking. The passerby with whom he’d crossed umbrellas had been, in a manner, right: this was a kind of personal situation.

Stevick helped the inspector replace the wooden planks over the hole, then gratefully accepted the gift of the second wrapped sandwich, which turned out to contain pleasantly peppery chicken salad, albeit on soggy white bread. Stevick had been hungrier than he realized. Before departing, the inspector went back to his car one last time, returning now with an olive-green duffel, which he chucked gently to the edge of the hole, just beside Stevick.

“What’s that?”

“Standard issue,” the inspector explained obscurely. “It’ll be there when you need it.” He offered Stevick a quick salute and was off.

It was only after the café had closed for the night, the chairs overturned on the tables, that the rain ceased completely, leaving Stevick with the question of whether his shift here ought to conclude. He shook out and shuttered the umbrella, and had just reached for the enigmatic duffel when he was greeted by the sound of his own name in the familiar voice of his ex, Charlotte. It was perhaps inevitable that she’d pass by if he camped out here all day. In another lifetime, which was what even yesterday seemed to be after this present occurrence, he might have been guilty of doing exactly that. As it happened, he’d overlooked completely the possibility of her wandering past. Charlotte was dressed and scented for a night on the town, clacking in her heels toward the subway entrance, most likely to undertake her usual carrousel of Stevick’s former favorite bars in the company of his lately-out-of-touch friends.

“Well, now, look at you,” she joshed. “Keeping busy, as usual.”

Stevick guiltily withdrew his hand from the duffelbag and stood alert to indicate his vigilance, though now, rain cleared, umbrella folded, it was hardly evident what his duties were. He’d always had to straighten his posture in Charlotte’s presence, her height and perfect carriage a kind of warning or rebuke to him, and now he found himself wishing that she’d step off the curb, down to his level. The three planks that covered the hole were too expertly flush to the asphalt to be any help to him.

“There’s a man in this hole, Charlotte.” It was the second time he’d tried to even the field by stating this absolute truth, almost as if he needed to hear it himself to believe it, though he’d been presiding there all day. He wanted acknowledgment of his effort, but first he had to establish the basic situation.

“Sure,” Charlotte said. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing.”

“I guess I’d heard of it, too, though it’s different to have it right in front of you. Still, I guess it has to be somewhere.”

“True enough,” Charlotte said. “I just hadn’t pictured you getting involved. But by your logic, I suppose, someone had to step forward.”

Stevick couldn’t really improve on this sentiment, so he let it stand.

“So, what’s in the bag?” Nothing was lost on Charlotte, he had to give her that.

“More sandwiches, I suspect,” Stevick said, surprising himself with the guess. Should they be called rations, or provisions? It depended on who was eating them, he supposed. “They’re not bad, if you like chicken salad. Take one, if you’re hungry.”

Charlotte had by this time poked inside the bag, assuming her usual privileges in regard to Stevick’s boundaries, and pulled out a plastic-wrapped jumpsuit, identical, except for its virgin state, to those worn by the operatives, and by the captive below. There appeared to be four or five of these stacked within the small duffel.

“You’re hired!” Charlotte exclaimed. “You’ve been promoted from a temp position to staff.”

Stevick found himself pleasingly able to ignore her goading. In many ways, Charlotte, like much else, was receding from view. The new conditions made irony a luxury. Was he meant to hoard the jumpsuits for his own use or to recruit other operatives from the neighborhood? Or, for that matter, were they intended for future incarcerees? Stevick considered the possibility that he’d eventually be fitted for a hole himself. The beauty of the uniform was that it settled nothing.

“Do you want to see him?” he asked Charlotte, and immediately regretted a question that seemed inappropriate, even somewhat craven on his part. He knew only after he’d said it that he would never again let himself use the man in the hole as a token or a bargaining chip. He was a person!

Charlotte’s cavalier reply felt predestined. “No, thank you,” she said. “I should go, I’m running late. But it’s really good to see you doing so well, Stevick.” Her voice was like a pat on a baby’s downy skull.

The hint of tenderness cloaking Charlotte’s dismissal disgusted Stevick. Talk about your passing connections! Stevick felt closer after a single day to the man in the hole, though they’d exchanged not a word. As he watched Charlotte make her way up the street, Stevick experienced only relief that she’d refused his suggestion. To pry up the planks when he had nothing to offer was a small indignity he had spared the captive below. The last thing Stevick wished to do, after all, was annoy him with inessentials. Success in an endeavor like this one lay in the details. Stevick was certain he was going to do a good job. ♦